80p. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Which twin has the Toni?

As you can see from the photo, two buildings. The one on the right, 103-105 Greene Street, was designed by our old friend, Henry Fernbach, back in 1879. It's a lived a life of silk goods and shirtwaists, then bohemian rediscovery, fabulous restaurant, expensive apartments, nice stores. The usual, thanks. Its mirror image, 101 Greene Street, was built at exactly the same time and lived an identical SoHo life.

...until it burned down in January 1957. A one-story garage took its place, or was fashioned from its remnants; the 1973 Landmarks Preservation Commission report on SoHo stated that "Although filed as an 'alteration' the changes were so extensive that they practically constitute a new building."

I know, I know. You're looking at that picture above and thinking Waaaait a minute. A garage. I should be seeing a garage here, and yet I am not seeing one--I see two buildings, conjoined twins, identical in every respect including, presumably, age. But no. Thanks to an ambitious collaboration between developer Goldman Properties, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi, and cast-metal specialists Historical Arts & Casting, Inc., the old 101 Greene Street was resurrected in its entirety, façade and all--indeed, the first new cast-iron façade built in SoHo in over a hundred years--using 103-105 as a model.

To take a building of no great reputation and bring it back to a state of wholeness it hadn't known in fifty years: what a wonderfully needless thing to do. Whether they're in a historically-sensitive building or no, people are still gonna buy the lofts, because lofts are big and spacious and sexy; save for a tiny coterie of the architecturally-aware, people'll pass 101 by and think--if they think about it all--that it was always like that. So I think 101 was done the way it was done out of a love of SoHo, corny as that sounds. From what I can tell, the whole thing was the brainchild of Goldman Properties; if you go to their website, wait about ten seconds, and turn up the volume on your computer, Tony Goldman himself will tell you how much he loves historic preservation in goofy dazzled prideful tones, sounding not unlike Jean Shepherd in A Christmas Story. Mr. Goldman, I salute you. One hates to give it up for a developer--distrust is always the safer position--but there we are.

80k. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



From left to right: 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street. Save for two, all the buildings were designed by one man, Henry Fernbach. He is the best-represented architect in the SoHo historic district, with thirty-four buildings to his name, twenty-five of them on Greene Street alone, in fact. Many are defined by rows of simple Tuscan columns, often supporting some seriously chunky arches whose name (if they even have one) escapes me.

Possessing both consistency and prodigiousness leaves an architect open to charges of hackery, and requesting a building that blends in rather than stands out leaves a client open to charges of immature taste. ("I want the same thing as that, only different. A little bit different.") On the other hand, the relative homogeneousness of Greene Street (as well as the rest of SoHo) might've been something collectively sought by architects and clients alike. How else to explain the spectacle of 65 and 67 Greene Street, the grey building on the left which is actually two separate buildings built by two separate architects (J.B. Snook and Fernbach respectively) for two separate owners, yet joined by a common façade? The result may have looked good. Even today, even after so much has come and gone in the neighborhood, even with the disfiguring fire escapes and new interlopers in former parking lots, when certain blocks are given a wide-angle view--say, looking down a street from somewhere in its middle--the brain and eye delights in blurring out all the nominal differences between buildings and connecting what they have in common until what it sees are faint and broken lines all merging towards a point on the horizon. But architectural homogeneity also had a more practical value, too, I'm guessing. It likely underscored the buildings that didn't fit in, which in the 1870s would've been the vice-breeding remnants of the neighborhood's residential and entertainment life--the very thing the industrialists and retailers moving into the area would want to isolate and destroy, physically and psychologically.



Fernbach is primarily remembered for his work on Central Synagogue, which is something else altogether from his stern neo-Grecs--it's...a polychrome celebration. He is sometimes cited as New York City's first Jewish architect of consequence, or even the first Jewish person to practice architecture in the country, though his sometime collaborator Leopold Eidlitz has been called similar. That this bellwether of cultural acceptance comes after nearly two hundred years of a Jewish presence in the city genuinely shocks me--though that's probably because I'm shamefully ignorant of Jewish history. Give me time.